Efficient Beacon Deployment for Large-scale Positioning

Instant and precise localization of indoor mobile users is fundamental for supporting various sophisticated location-aware services. Using Bluetooth low-power beacons for mobile user positioning has been reported as an effective approach, where the beacon deployment positioning (BDP) problem has been defined. The paper introduces a novel approach for solving large-scale BDP problems, aiming to significantly reduce beacon consumption from existing solutions with much less computation complexity. Extensive simulations are conducted to verify the proposed algorithm, whose beacon consumption is about 1.14 to 1.67 times and 0.2 to 0.48 times compared to those of the Mixed Integer Linear Program (ILP) and a naive iBeacon solution respectively. We have also observed that the running time scales well with the growth of the number of Test Positions and attenuation factors.